Saturday, August 15, 2015

Loyalty of Russian Bureaucracy to Moscow Wearing Thin

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 15 – The reaction
of officials in Tyumen’s far north highlights just how much Moscow must pay to
buy the loyalty of the bureaucracy and how rapidly that loyalty can dissipate if
the center attacks not phantom “enemies” but strikes at the privileges of that
stratum, according to “Novaya gazeta” journalist Georgy Borodyansky.

In the current issue of that Moscow
paper, he reports on a survey conducted by the URA.ru news agency concerning
the reaction of officials to the plans of the central government to reduce
their pensions, an action that not only causes them to be less patriotic but
even to consider “’a social revolt’” (novayagazeta.ru/politics/69546.html).

“The
servants of the people in Tyumen’s northern regions are not ready to share even
in part the fate of the population they serve, Borodyansky says.Officials there do not like the “anti-crisis”
proposal of the labor ministry to increase the pension age of government
employees to 65.

They are
angry for two reasons. On the one hand, it would deprive them of the benefits
they have enjoyed and feel entitled to by moving to that harsh land. And on the
other, because many went there for relatively short times to boost their
pensions, plans to increase the requirement to get additional payments from 15
to 20 years would reduce their pay in the future.

The
Moscow measure does not make any exceptions for what officials in the far north
consider their exceptional situation.As
a result, the bureaucrats are angry and beginning to express their anger first
among themselves and anonymously and then more openly. Now, they are going
public to journalists and politicians.”

Elena
Zlenko, the deputy speaker of the legislative assembly of the Yamalo-Nenets
district, says that “such initiatives undermine the foundations of the
government system. These bonuses were a serious stimulus for bureaucrats who
today are the foundation of the state.”Ignoring that is going to have consequences.

Her words
show what few want to acknowledge, Borodyansky says. Bureaucrats and not the
people are the foundation of the Russian state, and “the loyalty of those
bureaucrats costs a lot.”This is hardly
“the very best time to shake the power vertical because the country is
experiencing a crisis,” Zlenko says.

Moreover,
she adds, “the adoption of this law [without modificaitons] will lead to a
growth in corruption because it will become much more difficult to keep state
employees from engaging in it.”After
all, they would want to make up what would amount to at least a 55 percent cut
in their former pay.

Another
regional politician, Mikhail Serdyuk, a Duma deputy who is running for governor
of the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District, says that officials as a whole
consider this draft law “extremely unjust” and that his fraction “does not
support it.And a third, Vyacheslav
Tetekin, who represents the KPRF in the local parliament agrees.

Among the
population, he says, there is no love lost on the bureaucrats.But everyone can see, Tetekin suggests, that this
move against the bureaucrats will open the way to moves against the benefits of
others as well. That kind of thinking will lead to new alliances that won’t be
designed to support what Moscow wants to do.